rambling about using and owning ploopy mini for over half a year, long post
ploopy mini is a nice solid trackball, however there are weird little things that sometimes just drive you crazy, i have a prebuilt (this will be crucial in later parts of the post)
EDIT after another 1.5 years: the switches are dogshit do not buy this if you want something that is gonna last you more than 2 years without your intervention
- whole thing is 3d printed, so quality can be funny, in my case, sensor shines through bottom of the trackball
- it could make use of some mx ergo-like rubber coating on top (seriously, it's like the only thing i miss from mx ergo, besides wireless but can't have everything ig), which i might or might not do at some point
- you'll probably need one of those gel-filled mousepads if you don't like having a hanging wrist, without the mousepad, its not that comfortable
- scroll is often freaking out after booting to os (and just plugging it in), until you scroll yourself
- the sensor is a downgrade from ploopy classic, it tops out at 1375 DPI with lower polling rate, while the one from the classic can do 10K DPI and 1000Hz polling rate, and iirc you can set more granular DPI overall, rather than just 375-1375 DPI in 125 DPI jumps
- related to previous one, i forgot the proper name for it, but the sensor itself is unable to catch up if you spin the ball too fast, though you need to put effort in that, so it's not noticeable if you don't just spin it like that
- stock firmware for prebuilt comes with just one layer filled it, and 1375 DPI as the default, which means that you need to flash your firmware as soon as you get it, because otherwise it's not that usable if you don't like huge speed by default
- drag scroll (ability to use ball as scroll) is great, though imo hold-by-default makes more sense than toggle-by-default
- diagonals in drag scroll are glitchy
- here's something that is most likely different on every mini, getting it to boot to bootloader is very simple in theory (hold the button right to the ball and plug the cable), but in practice its very tedious, and you'll probably wear out the microusb before it boots, you can probably alleviate it by binding a reset button in VIA, but:
-- the mentioned VIA keymap is not the default and you need to flash it if you bought the trackball as prebuilt, which brings us to the previous point, on DIY kit, you need to flash it yourself so this doesn't apply here really
-- other option is to short pins on the board, which, you guessed it, means disassembly, not something i am fond of, since i am a lazy fuck
- while i am on the topic of disassembling and DIY kit, from what i have seen with nikuw and his friend, the kit itself is kinda fucky to build, as proven by him and his friend, some of it is probably/most likely skill issue though
- back to VIA, for some reason, there's a bug where the keycodes are shifted by one to the left on every layer above 0, and that means that the left-most key from layer 1 is gone in the editor, and you need to redo the whole layout everytime you change something in VIA; i haven't checked if it got fixed during these 6 months, i saw some commit regarding VIA changes, so maybe...?
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